Hi everyone. I realise this is probably a bit of a noob question, but I'm actually a C# developer working on a legacy system, and can't remember much unix.

I want to read from a pipe-delimeted file like formatted thusly:

idno|PRODUCT|Name|street town postcode|etc|etc|etc|etc
idno|PRODUCT|Name|street town postcode|etc|etc|etc|etc
idno|PRODUCT|Name|street town postcode|etc|etc|etc|etc

I want to copy each line to another file, dependant upon the PRODUCT existing in a string variable I'm holding in memory: "prod1|prod2|prod3" ($products in example below)

Therefore I was trying:

for line in `cat $temp_dir/$Filename | awk '{ print $0 } '`
do
prod=`echo "$line" | awk ' BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $2} '`
valid_prod=`echo $products | grep "$prod"`
if [ -n "$valid_prod" ] ; then
echo "$line" >> $new_file.txt
fi
done

however this line variable seems to separate based on spaces, creating the new file as:

idno|PRODUCT|Name|street
town
postcode|etc|etc|etc|etc

Is there anyway I can pass each line through as a single parameter, regardless of spaces?

Any help is greatfully appreciated,
Dave